If he had lived there would have been no Era of Reconstruction, with its repressive agencies and oppressive legislation; there would have been wanting to the extremism of the time the bloody cue of his taking off to mount the steeds and spur the flanks of vengeance.

For Lincoln entertained, with respect to the rehabilitation of the Union, the single wish that the Southern States--to use his homely phraseology--"should come back home and behave themselves," and if he had lived he would have made this wish effectual as he made everything else effectual to which he addressed himself.
His was the genius of common sense.

Of perfect intellectual acuteness and aplomb, he sprang from a Virginia pedigree and was born in Kentucky.
He knew all about the South, its institutions, its traditions and its peculiarities.

He was an old-line Whig of the school of Henry Clay, with strong Emancipation leaning, never an Abolitionist.

"If slavery be not wrong," he said, "nothing is wrong," but he also said and reiterated it time and again, "I have no prejudice against the Southern people.